Category: Uncategorized

On giving up Blogspot, remembering the post that could have been, and starting fresh

Advertisements

On Monday I decided to return to blogging after almost four years, and I chose to cover my picks in my 4th annual March Madness Mascot Showdown. It takes about five minutes to fill out a bracket, but to actually discuss which mascot could take the other one in a fight… sixty-three times…it was a very ambitious post for someone just recently returning to blogging. I was able to put up Part I on my old site here, which covers the first round.

Blogspot was always an extremely fickle site for me. Formatting was a nightmare, and I am a bit of a stickler when it comes to format. Margins would spontaneously change, fonts would never stay the same, pictures would zoom across the page like we were in a domestic dispute. But the last straw was when I was about 90% of the way done with Part II and Blogspot decided to erase all the text and say, “Wow Darren! That was a huge change you just made to your draft. We better auto-save it immediately and submit the post so you can’t recover any of it.” It was a great post, too. I wrote a modern fable called “The Turtle and the Bear.” I fawned over a blue Pegasus with massive biceps. I extended the rumors that Friar Dom of Providence is probably a serial killer. I answered the question of what happens if you drag a phoenix to Hell. And the centerpiece of it all was a championship where the Masked Rider of Texas Tech rides his horse in a hurricane while hollering like Slim Pickens on his atomic bomb in Dr. Strangelove. And Blogspot ruined it all. A second stab at it would take far too long to redo–the tournament would be well underway by then–and it wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining if I’m just trying to recall what I said. If you were anticipating Part II, I apologize. (Texas Tech wins the whole thing, if you wanted to know).

So far, this site isn’t making me very upset. It’s a low standard for a blog site, but it meets it nonetheless. And a new website seems like an appropriate reflection of where I am in life. That’s a topic I plan on writing about soon, but I wanted to ease into blogging again with a fun (albeit laborious) post. And it got a lot more views than I thought:

I’m all about those low expectations.

So I’ll keep posting, hopefully on topics diverse enough that it never gets boring. It’s pretty therapeutic to think that my blog could crack some smiles every time I update it.